


bright impossibility

by orphan_account



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Arson, Blood, Control, Control Issues, Dreams, Dreamscapes, Illusions, M/M, Manipulation, Not Really Character Death, Obsession, Poison, Romance, Tragic Romance, Trippy, Violence, Weirdness, i guess mania too??, playing god, tw: descriptions of blood, tw: some violence but there's not many in-depth descriptions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:22:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22865518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: So, this is where they end. But it is also where they begin.
Relationships: Huang Ren Jun/Lee Jeno
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	bright impossibility

Silver rains down from empty skies. He looks up, raises a hand. Curious, curious. Step into the light, little star, feel that molten touch over your cold skin, your cold, dying heart. He turns it. Closer, bring it down into view: molten mercury, glimmering blue with heat, silver fastened to his fingertips.

Renjun takes in swirls of silver and blue, mercury, trapped in an endless dance with itself. Bites. The poison is dancing with his blood, a gentle dance, a dance that leads him in loops and loops until his blood is dizzy with confusion and spun into the poison’s waiting grasp. His nails are silver and his blood is mercury.

Gold chipping away at silver. A blink, a stare directed downwards. Eyes lidded, thoughts hidden, the illusion of someone soft and innocent present forth. The gold-eyed stranger reaches up for a hand. For a kiss. Renjun presents to them his mercury, an illusion of his own.

Something toxic ─ bright, yes, but imperfect. A shining silver to swallow up the dawn. His mercury reaches out, takes the metal slinking through veins, pulling it out to dance. Dance freely, or with your own constraints. Do as you wish.

The world is Renjun’s to control, to twist, to shape.

The dance progresses. Fluid in motion, fluent in meaning, Mercury is a liquid that is free to kill. Toxicity leaks out into open wounds, spills from the mouth to the join of the throat. Dip your partner into a final move. Outstretch, extend, bow.

Your audience is watching, after all.

Gold falls down into endless silver, a metallic sea. Delocalisation: there is no connection between Renjun and the golden mind, no association, no bond that has been formed. The mind falls down noiselessly.

Hands outstretched. A stick of something, swollen with feather-light clouds. He reaches out, gentle, takes it. Tears it to pieces, scatters the fragments onto the floor: there it is, a hand, still outstretched. An offering. Laughter swallows it up.

The laughter is kind, gentle. It does not belong in this monster of a world.

Renjun eats. It is a pretty little thing, a parcel of pastry stuffed with cotton candy clouds, tied off with a little strawberry bow. That is peeled away first, layer by layer. The strawberry is sweet and coated in iron. Warm, familiar. He eats. Pastry gives to cotton gives to something softer, lighter. Sticks in the back of his teeth and gnaws at the back of his mind.

Renjun eats.

Finished with the meal, the plate is pushed aside. Extra hands from unknown limbs take the plate away, offer up a napkin instead. Deny it, step into something brighter, something beautiful. His tongue at the corner of his lips, licking up the excess, taking in the extra. Iron and metal, cookies and cream beneath it. Blood soaked into ice cream.

Blood. No blood has been shed ─ there are no bodies, there is no blood ─ there should only be mercury and alloys lingering in these quiet spaces. A finger brushes against lips. He looks down, drinking in the impossible sights. Nothing is impossible yet this is an impossibility. His fingers are red ─ his hands are red ─ why is there so much red?

Breathe. Breathe in the air, soft and still, no taste and no sound carried upon it. This is your reality. You shape it as you wish. Renjun does not need the reminder, only the confirmation. Do not be afraid to care; do not let caring consume you.

He bites the ends of his nails. They are long cut short, but what does it matter? Renjun tastes iron and blood. Drink it down, swallow up the feeling to some cold corner of the back of your mind. Savour it. Crave more, but do not give in.

He wakes.

Jeno presses tight against his side. An arm around his waist, his legs kicking out over the sides. “Missed you,” he says, and his eyes are alight with something. He links their hands, almost unconsciously. Fingers interlaced with fingers. A gentle fondness. A quiet love.

He’s not quite sure when they began. Where could they begin, with an impossibility lingering in the small gaps between them, and doubt in their empty words? It makes no sense. But Renjun is an expert in the nonsensical. He has long learned to avoid voices whispering of a world reborn and ghosts begging for mercy.

It is impractical in the short term. But Renjun has a way about him, of twisting the impractical into something useful, something needed. He always has enjoyed playing God, and this is no exception.

The first part: love him. Love him with all you have to offer, until he is drawn in by your quiet love, by that torch you hold up to him in the darkness. Love him like you can love no other.

Renjun is an expert at the impossible: he creates blood where there is none, draws mercury from beneath his skin, loves where there is nothing else left. Perhaps Jeno is the impossibility, in this case. A love that was never meant to last.

A lover that was never meant to be.

Yet here they are. Jeno tightens his grip on his fingers. Smiles. There is something about him, like this, frail and weak and open. Like this, Renjun could just ─ take him away, spirit him into some impossible location and leave him there for good. That is not in the plan.

But it would be so _good._ To have him all to himself, love him with no bars placed, keep Jeno as his own. Then he smiles, and it’s soft and kind, and something in him gives out. No ─ he could not. It would be cruel to bestow a fate like that upon him.

His smile is all too kind. Renjun leans in, presses a kiss to the corner of it. It lifts up higher. High and wide and full with joy, it is all too much like Jeno himself. He tightens his hold on the intertwined fingers, pulls them up to rest on his knee.

It is a picturesque scene, Renjun supposes. The empty space is wide beneath them, their joined hands are just a small part of a larger picture. Focus, he tells himself. You have the here and now, after all. There is a sound building in the back of Jeno’s throat. Somehow, he feels impossibly small.

_“There is poison in your veins, darling,”_ croons a gold-tinged voice. Plunge it off the edge of a cliff and watch it shatter over the rocks, bitter and sweet. _“Oh, how I would love to eat it up…”_ Laughter once more. Low, mellow, ringing in the back of his head. He does not want to let the sound go.

Gold hums once more, sweet, _“then don’t let me go, darling, I’m not leaving until you make me.”_

Renjun bares his teeth. Mercury swims through his body, up, over the cavity of his mouth. The laughter echoes. Oh, how he wants to swallow it up, drink in that gentle, opposing voice. It could all be his. _“Drink up, little madman.”_

Bite down. Take it in. Renjun eats up the sound, the faint imprints of shock, the instinctive reply. A call and response. Blood and fire and ice, mingling together, the shock rippling through his body. The call: tantalizing words, a whispered promise, _“I’m not leaving until you make me.”_

The response: eating up the faint shocks, swallowing down the laughter and the words. Renjun breathes against an invisible body, “but you are the powerless one here, are you not? You are naught but an imprint, little shadow ─ an idea.” The response: laughter of his own, eyes glimmering with knowledge the gold can never have, something more drowned out in meaning.

“Do you wish to taste poison, little shadow?” Renjun murmurs. “Do you wish to taste blood? I could offer you that… could offer you anything you wanted, little shadow. Anything at all.”

_“But you won’t,”_ laughs the gold tainted mind. _“You won’t, because you like this. You like the challenge, don’t you? Go on, then. Offer me up mercury and I’ll provide something for you in future.”_

He laughs, too. Laughter at nothingness, a dream stained mercurial blue; more laughter, a sign of madness. The hysteria is only just setting in. The adventure has only just begun. Think, think, you are curious about this empty voice. From the nothing he draws a dagger.

The blade curves over his cheek, trailing over an invisible line. His mind does not process it. His hands move on instinct, an unnatural force guiding him into position. Fluid movements blend together, cut through nothing ─ blood is on his hands, blood is dripping from a tear in the fabric of reality.

Renjun laughs and swallows up the taste of the golden one’s smile. He drives the blade deep into earth that only appears as it falls.

The second part: draw him in. The illusion of love has already been presented. Renjun is a lover caught in the throes of emotion, and his every breath is laced with poison. The plans come to him easily. Something aligns, in the back of his mind. An idea in the beginning of becoming, as if something has aligned just for it to play out.

So this is the part he plays. A lover in a new relationship, someone eager to please, someone with a lot to lose. He has always made himself smaller, carried a sense of frailty that comes from being the quiet presence at the back of the room.

It is all too easy to be an actor. Some days it feels like that’s all he is ─ an actor on an empty stage, no audience to see him, no others to speak his madness to. His soliloquy is spoken to nobody, yet the words ring out anyway. When did he get so weak?

This is all a distraction. Jeno taps two fingers on his knuckles. _are you listening? are you there?_ He gives the barest of nods. His own fingers tap quietly on the column of stone. _do you not know? i love you ─ love you ─_ Jeno does not catch the lie. Maybe there’s no lie in it.

Either way, Jeno turns his head to catch Renjun’s eyes. His smile is soft and eager, like he could burst with joyful energy. He picks dirt out from under his nails absent-mindedly, smears it over the frayed ends of his jeans. “I love you,” whispers Jeno. “You know that, right?”

It feels like a secret. The way it is whispered into the little spaces between them, hesitant, hopeful, looking for something that he fears Renjun cannot offer up to him. It feels like Jeno is afraid. It feels like Renjun is his secret.

But that’s an act, isn’t it? There is nothing about them that needs to remain hidden. It’s the perfect cover, in that regard. Draw him in with the promise of something hidden, something secretive. It’s the little rebellion of it all ─ if something is forbidden then you are all the more likely to want it, after all.

Isn’t that how these things all work?

Jeno smiles. Tightens his grip on Renjun’s hand, like holding on hard enough will prevent him from ever having to let go. His kisses taste of deceit. Renjun decides that loving someone has never been better.

There is an outline of a body. The neck, cut, blood flowing from a precise incision. It is a babbling brook winding down a hill, slow and steady, following a path that it has always known. Dip a finger into it, see it ripple and flow away, feel. This is not how it was supposed to begin; it is a beginning nonetheless.

A beginning is also an ending, in this sense. At least, that is what it feels like. An end. The end of something important, something that he did not know was important until now.

The outline stretches, shifts. Fingers stretch up and into the sky, up and towards him. _“Hello, darling,”_ whispers Jeno, and his voice is coloured gold. _“I didn’t even think you’d miss me.”_ He feels cold – the cold of a dead body, a lover in mourning. A lover in resuscitation.

_Tick, tock, little madman,_ whispers a voice without meaning.

Renjun laughs. His body shakes; there is a knife from somewhere and he lashes out blindly with it. The gold-coloured voice reaches out but twists out of the way. Does it have more control, or is he losing his touch? He has not played God in a long time, after all.

Move out of the way. Adjust the grip on the blade, spin it around. Drive it against the wound – hit him where it hurts, muses Renjun, almost kind. Here he has the advantage. A hand catches the knife, tries to push it back. It is easy work to move aside. It is even easier to pull the blade with him and drive it between ribs.

This is the least subtle he has been. This is the most fun he has ever had.

Renjun wakes, and he has blood on his hands.

So this is where they are.

Jeno is holding his hands. His grip is gentle, secure. It only takes one hand for Jeno to hold both of his own; the other is loose at his side, absent-mindedly flicking at a lighter. Words alone are enough to set Renjun ablaze.

“You’re so pretty…” murmurs Jeno, hands clasped around the lighter. “I love you, darling.” A tilt of the head. A hand moves, gently tilts his head upwards. The kiss is all too kind. “Come with me?”

“Of course,” he sighs. “I’ll go with you anywhere.”

Renjun lets himself be led along. The air smells of liquid nitrogen and promises. The grip on his hand slowly loosens, Jeno slowly gets faster. They are running through empty streets, the freedom exhilarating.

And then – it all stops.

“Watch,” murmurs Jeno. His voice is soft and quiet. Reverence, he supposes. “It’s just – it’s beautiful, isn’t it, Renjun?”

A flick of his finger, curling upwards. Flames spring up from the end of the lighter. Jeno lowers it to the ground, his eyes wild. He sits. Stares. The flame catches at the last moment. It spreads along the ground, slow, slow, and then the world is ablaze.

Renjun laughs. The sky is painted amber and gold. Mercury swims in his veins. The final part: watch everything you have worked for finally come to fruition. Watch the lover as they fall down to you.

_“Catch me if you can, Renjun,”_ whispers Jeno’s golden voice. He runs.

**Author's Note:**

> [twt](https://twitter.com/phantomhwa)  
> [writing specific twt](https://twitter.com/cadenseas)  
> ahaha this fic is my new brainchild!! i've spent about three days straight writing this, while blocked up with sinusitis (n right after i said i don't get that sick;;) but i'm super proud of this! huge thanks to my mam for betaing this for me, even tho i was sick and shouldn't have been writing <3 ilu


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